cameron wallace. (insideandout) wrote in ofourowndevice, @ 2013-05-03 20:13:00 |
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Who: Cameron.
Where: Cameron’s room.
When: Early morning.
Warnings: Triggers for self-harm.
It was still light by the time he made it back to his room, his thoughts scattered and his hands shaking so badly that he almost couldn’t twist the doorknob to get inside. He had the same trouble twisting the lock once he was inside to seal himself in, seal everyone else out, shut the world out and keep it away. His fingers felt clumsy and uncoordinated and his stomach was a tight knot, almost painful. Awkwardly he crossed to the window looking out and drew the curtains, pulling them a little harder than was necessary but not even hearing the rings rattle in protest on the rail overhead. Cameron was physically present but mentally he was elsewhere. Emotionally was anyone’s guess. Mentally he was still down in the lobby trying to figure out why he couldn’t leave, why he couldn’t get back on his way. When he’d left his wretched little apartment it had been with the intention of trying to turn his life around -- or at least try -- and now to find out that he couldn’t do that, that some force he couldn’t possibly understand was keeping him from doing so, it was more than he could take.
He had always been an anxious person, he’d always been susceptible to nerves, easily overwhelmed, and this was exactly the sort of thing he wasn’t cut out for. Standing there not far from the foot of the bed with no idea what to do with himself or the bag with his things in Cameron went over and over the conversation in his head, he had already forgotten who it was he had spoken to and why they’d even started speaking but he remembered enough. He couldn’t leave. There was no way. Everything would be all right, they had said, there was no need to panic, but Cameron couldn’t accept words like that. Nothing was ever all right. There was always some reason to panic. Something was always wrong.
Before he knew that he was even moving he was pushing his way into the bathroom with an extra weight in his hand. Without even knowing what he was doing he was closing the door behind him, locking that one too despite the unlikelihood of anyone getting into the main room, leaving the light off because he didn’t need it but pulling the blind down as well, making it a little darker. The light was enough to make him even more anxious than he already was and nausea was bubbling up from the pit of his stomach, the taste of bile on the back of his tongue as his hands trembled, his back sliding down the wall so he could sit on the floor, his knees bent with his legs hunched up in front of him. At some point he had pulled his jacket off. The sleeves of that jacket had been the only cover over his forearms.
When he used the small blade he didn’t feel the pain, didn’t even really see the blood that was drawn, felt only a disconnected sense of relief, almost a release of pressure from the centre of his chest, like someone had thrown open a window or a door in a stifling heat. His breathing had been shallow and frantic when he’d stumbled into the bathroom but it started to slow now, the heaving rise and fall of his chest easing as he closed his eyes and rocked his head back against the wall. The shaking was subsiding, his fingers curling slowly inward to form a fist. It only encouraged the flow but there was no danger, he knew how far he could go and where and even in his panicked state he hadn’t misjudged. Cameron had been doing this too many years to make stupid mistakes.
Of course, Cameron had no way of knowing that what he had just done was the whole reason he was trapped, that so long as he kept making that choice he was stuck here. Cameron had been relying on the pain -- the same pain he had barely even felt, at least not in the act -- for far too long, he had been falling back on it for too many years. It had come to define him in a way he was too blind to see and that self-imposed ignorance would keep him here until he woke up and saw what he had been doing to himself, just how much damage he had done. Cameron was too reliant on the pain to pull back from it and it would take more than one defeat to make him see that. After all, it was defeat that had brought him here in the first place. Defeat was what had started him down this path. By this point in his life, it was all Cameron knew.